Diana Muller Fine Art

Thursday, August 31, 2017

Small Roads Theatre and Dining Festival is the brainchild of Kerry musician and entertainer Dezy Walls. Utilising Small Theatres and local talent, the folk behind the festival will be bringing six plays on the road all over Kerry and Cork between September 22-November 12th.

I'm delighted to say that Brushwood Studios is providing the set set design again this year. In an unusual approach the sets are paintings, printed large, as backdrops. Here are some examples of last year's sets. The camera doesn't do them justice though the live shows were spectacular.

Hay Fever

Not the Life I Ordered

Not the Life I Ordered

Shirley Valenitine

Here are two specially commissioned pieces by myself for the play Glorious. I'm looking forward to seeing them on stage I cant wait to join in the festivities!

Friday, September 16, 2016

This year I’m participating in the Kerry Visual Arts Showcase. An exhibition which runs at Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, Killarney, Co. Kerry from September 16th – October 15th 2016.

I’m delighted to be hanging in the same talented company as Deirdre McKenna, Pat Owen, Miroslava Pavelkova, Joseph Keating, Des Fitzgerald and Diarmuid O'Sullivan.

The Exhibition was curated by Orla Flynn and funded by Kerry County Council and the Arts Council.

This is one of my pieces. Titled A Head Full Of Hills. Inspired by the courage and talent of My friend Eilise O’Sullivan. A dancer who was raised in the Black Valley. One of the most remote and beautiful parts of Co. Kerry.

Monday, June 22, 2015

What can I say about my eight year collaboration with Jeffery F. Barken?

I first met Jeff in 2007. He was a student hitchhiking around Ireland. My Aunt picked him up and brought him home. We sat and talked about our hobbies, studies and plans for the future. I could tell even then that Jeffrey was more serious about his writing than most kids his age.

We stayed in touch and, a few years later, he contacted me regarding his new idea for a magazine called monologging.org, a global project that would facilitate collaboration between different artistic disciplines. I'd never heard of anything like it before.

I suppose the work we have since embarked on together can be viewed as a trilogy.

The first completed collaborative project on monologging.org was Mackerel. Jeff wrote a story inspired by his time in Galway and I painted two corresponding oil on canvas pictures. The result was a three dimensional, interactive experience. Jeff wrote the story in short installments and I sketched the action and experimented. The final paintings were organic in their conception and by the time we finished the project we better understood each other’s work and creative process.

Sketch- Mackerel

Painting under construction - Mackerel

Shoal- Finished painting for Mackerel.

Around that time Jeff started sending me more of his writing, including a novel titled Idle in September. The story chronicled the lives of several young musicians. They form a bluegrass band and tour the US in the aftermath of 9/11. These were the characters that would stay with me for the next few years. Jeff never published Idle, but he continued to develop his characters and prose in a series of short stories that he published in May 2013, entitled This Year in Jerusalem. I was delighted to contribute a series of India ink and acrylic illustrations to the book that he designed.

Cover for This Year in Jerusalem

Our work on This Year in Jerusalem was more organized than the Mackerel project and I was fascinated by the notion of bringing these characters to life. By using the same characters, sometimes likeable, sometimes severely flawed, somehow always sympathetic, in many different, yet interconnected stories, Jeff created his own little universe. The trials, joys and troubles these actors experience never actually end, they go on to live in Jeff’s other works. Their collective journeys through the heartland of the USA, the Middle East, and finally New York City comprise a creative saga.

An illustration from This year in Jerusalem.

So that brings us, along with Ari Shultz, Miles Fletcher, Ethan Mav and other prominent characters to the sinister world of All the Lonely Boys in New York.

All the Lonely Boys In New York - Cover

For which I was honored to design the cover and illustrations. The cover was by far the most challenging of the three projects. How does one sum up a story Like All The Lonely Boys In New York in one image?

Illustration from All the Lonely Boys In New York

The book is at once personal, intimate and immense. A scathing social commentary on the 21st century, distilling many complex ideas into a deceptively simple story. Eventually we settled on a scene from the last page. The importance of which will resonate with anyone who has read the book.

So we go back to the roots of the project: Jeff has prompted me to engage and interpret his work, Dara, in turn, has indulged my art. This exciting concept for encouraging artistic collaboration on a global scale is the magic behindMonologging.org.

What a journey it’s been! I’m glad to have been there from the beginning and see this talent take shape.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Today is YomHaShoa. It's been three years since I started this project. But I was finally able, last week, to publicly display my portraits of Irish Holocaust survivors at the Irish Jewish Museum in Dublin at the old Synagogue. It was a wonderful event and I’m so glad I could be part of it. The four paintings had to come home with me for safe keeping but will be available for exhibitions for the rest of the year.
There is a temporary exhibition at the Museum, of sketches and prints, for the next four Sundays.

Taking with Jan Kaminski, one of the survivors I painted.
Photo credit: Fionán O'Connell

This is a tribute to some of those who survived and built their lives in Ireland. Four members of the community immortalised in portraiture, whose lives have served as an example that the human spirit can stand against brutality. Their portraits tell the story.

A portrait makes people take notice. We automatically ask ourselves who the person was and why an artist chose to paint them. My goal in painting these four individuals was to provoke exactly these questions. If one person sees these paintings and wonders, asks or reads then I will feel I have done something worthwhile.

There may be a time in the future, when the war is no longer in living memory, when we no longer identify with our history. But a portrait can last for centuries and a story can live forever.

Zoltan Zinn-Collis as a child. Pastel sketch.

Edit Zinn-Collis as a child. Pastel sketch.

We will not forget you.The statistics lie like bonesThey blow on the windlike a flock of birds they reshape themselvesinto something we can understanda seven digit number.We will not forget you.We are not ink on paper we are not to be quantified in ledgersand be it in their millions or one alone every soul should be remembered.We will not forget you.One in the line at the corner of his eye Two in the curve of her mouth when she smiledThree in the hands that lifted a child Four in the movement of shoulders at workFive in the eyes that saw Six in the mouth that spoke.We will not forget you.Diana Muller 2015.

Friday, September 26, 2014

I’ve often thought that if one were to paint this part of the world people wouldn’t believe it was real. It's the kind of landscape the impressionists would have killed for. More wild than pastoral, with ruins and famine-era stone walls scattered through it. Sometime in the early spring I was walking up a local hill, looked out over an almost obscenely beautiful visa and thought.. “ What am I doing not painting this right now?"

Heron at Dawn.

So these are scenes from areas within walking distance of the studio ( the fine weather also meant I could get outside to sketch which was great.)

Walking, Late july.

There is no way to capture the real beauty of this part of the country though. You’ll just have to come and see it for yourself.

Sunday, June 8, 2014

After a fairly long break from the medium I have turned my hand to ink again and expanded my range of Everyday Tales Prints. They're not up on the website yet so the first look is here. ( Below. )

When people see them they are sometimes surprised that they are mine. My usual style is expansive, complex and colourful, and couldn’t be further stylistically from the stark minimalism of these small pictures.

I have never believed that artists should constrain themselves to one style, medium or subject. It makes it easier for an agent or gallery to market your work if you do, but I suppose art and economics never have gotten along very well.

What I have found is that the only way I can avoid boredom and stagnation is to challenge myself, and what is artistic style really but the artist deliberately putting constraints on themselves, a set of specific obstacles in their own way?

After a period of creative block , I one day found myself doodling this:

There's something about the image that is familiar. But I’m sure I never saw it anywhere. Something poignant and iconic but at the same time almost cliché.

Big Bad.

Umbrella

Mushrooms

The theme is obvious: Childhood. Snippets of memory, that almost hallucinogenic imagination mixed up with ordinary activities, illustration from story books, those moments that meant nothing at the time but stand out retrospectively.

They are red, black and white always. These are the most primal and basic of colours, highly symbolic and applicable to a myriad of things, mythological, psychological and historical. They can’t be anything but a kick in the stomach for most of us.

It is interesting how varied the interpretation is. Some people are charmed by them and buy them for their children. Others find them utterly sinister and scold me for having made them.

I have no desire to stop painting in oils and make them my life’s work, but they act as a palate cleanser of sorts. I’m able to see clearer after having worked on them. When every line counts and every colour has meaning it gives one perspective.